Your glasses spike the screenlight at your face like a kid burning ants. HUD branded on your cheekbones.

Look at this coinslot flange, puckering up to take your hyakuen in an industrial-age kiss.

The lights in Hey are famously blue. First foot off the IN escalator is *that* row of a dozen or so Egrets on either side. They actually have a Kodak PhotoPoint(TM) standee there now, yellow greyed by the blue light, with a cutout for where experts say to point your camera. That’s actually true!

I’m hearing bad things about the independents. Even Sega is shutting shops. Akiba 2-kan – iconic! – is gone. Photos of staff bowing outside in thanks for years of patronage from also-bowing, clapping crowds.

Gun Bullet – also AKA’d as Point Blank. Not the usual conveyor-belt murder. Weird thing is you’re basically playing extremely simple kids’ games – picture pairs, snap, spot the difference – but looking like you’re playing The House of the Dead.

I feel like I should have an obituary prepared for this game. It’s on a hell of a run – since 2006!

Teeth bared; talons out. But look at the posture of their right hands. Claws, but relaxed claws, ready to swoop at the attack buttons with quite a travel. Wouldn’t your response be quicker if you started nearer the buttons? It’s not that kind of reflexes. You play with rhythm, where the travel helps. Reflexes are to quickly change rhythm. If fighters were music games they’d be jazz duo jam sessions.

Officially branded (with a felt-tip) Taito HEY headphones, which hang on a self-adhesive hook on the side of The Ninja Warriors. It's a robot-ninja-based beat-em-up, three screens wide in a Darius cab from 1987.

Good old rail shooters up for a one-coin-stand. Maybe these are for gaijin rolling off the escalator, spluttering into port from the alien seas of UFO catchers and Nesica Live.

In Akihabara, the arcades don’t have to be polite. On the contrary, it would be the zakkaya or Ginza stationer who would have to apologise to passersby.

Gitadora: Guitar Hero and DrumMania. True companions – the point of each other. (Since 1999, so Rock Band didn’t invent the rock band.)

In the 1970s there were 10 of these buildings in a row. In an earthquake in which no one was harmed or inconvenienced, they all began to collapse in unison, at a steady tempo, by one storey at a time.

Seemed harmless enough, in 95, shooting people so they die. Just a game, dad – god!

Mortal Kombat was supposed to be a Jean-Claude Van Damme game. No JC in the end, so they went for guys in pointy hats and balaclavas pulling each other’s spines out. And lo, born was a multimedia franchise up there with Care Bears and My Little Pony.

80s arcades: the heyday of videogame showbusiness.

Bubble Bobble became an icon. Cutie dragons burping poppers at trippy edible baddies.

1985. Beds under desks for months. Ravaged eyes, forgotten families. Sega-AM1 are ready: World, meet Fantasy Zone.

FInal Lap R was the last in Namco’s legendary Final Lap arcade racer series, released in 1993.

Flying Power Disc (or, stupidly, Windjammers outside Japan) shows you a future of total sports perfection. This ultimate sport combines the pseudofunctional fetishwear of beach volleyball with the hardpolished maple of the NBA with the candyised plastic bodyarmour of the NFL with the circle going back and forth of Pong.

I guess the piano equivalent of Mario Kart controller twisting would be wiggling vibrato on the keys or conducting the strings while your hands are in the air. Chunithm lets you do that.

90s gamers know the magic. Quartercentury later and the blueandwhite trigger word still plays that voice. MKUltra shit. By now, you’re hearing Green Hill Zone, as we all will in the pre-death seconds.

This Christmas the 6th CD goes on sale!

Style never goes out of fashion. Lack of style never comes into fashion, so likewise can never go out, I suppose.

Virtual On Oratorio Tangram: so much more than just four pins in a dictionary.